The first batch of people who made money with AIGC have already started overseas

The wind of AI writing applications first blew AI novels. This article mainly talks about the development of AI writing tools and the competition of related companies in this field. Using AI to write novels has gradually become a hot phenomenon. Recommended for Internet friends to read.

In April, online writer Mumu was attracted by an AI writing tool. After deciding on the story outline, the AI-assisted novel generated more than 20,000 words, which not only achieved contextual coherence, but also sublimated the theme in some content. In the end, Mumu became a paying user of this tool before he used up all the free words.

"As an AI writing tool that charges fees as soon as it goes online, Frog Writing has been online for six months and has more than 200,000 users. The next-day retention rate of paying users is 45%, and the monthly retention rate can reach 60%. The average usage time is 4.7 hours. " Wan Lei, co-founder of AIWaves Inc., told Alphabet List.

As a rare AI big model application with "positive ROI" nowadays, at a time when big model traffic-generating methods such as "0 yuan purchase" and "free use" are prevalent, Wa Wa Writing seems to be living a more "comfortable" life than its peers.

Using AI to write novels has gradually become a new gold mine that large model manufacturers cannot ignore.

According to the "2023 China Online Literature Development Research Report" released by the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there will be 1 billion Internet users in China in 2023, nearly half of whom will be online literature users. The scale of the domestic online literature reading market has reached 40.43 billion yuan, and the online literature industry has ushered in a 300 billion yuan market.

Literary creators have long made "writing novels with AI" a popular AI sideline. At the same time, "there are currently about 20 to 30 million novel and short story writers, and millions of new ones appear every year." For Wan Lei, who came from Tencent and left the company with a high annual salary to start his own business, " Although the market (AI content creation) is very vertically segmented, it also has a market size of tens of billions. "

Around the term "AI writing", big companies do not hide their ambitions. In addition to the general large-scale model manufacturers such as Dark Side of the Moon and MiniMax, which have launched new scenarios such as "writing novels and writing Xiaohongshu copywriting", Tomato Novel, which is backed by ByteDance, has also been "proactively volunteered by the technical middle office to provide AI writing services for Tomato authors. Now on Tomato Novel, an AI author can publish 100 novels a month." A person close to ByteDance told Zizibang.

And when "the text generated by AI is no longer the illogical and dry summary report of the GPT era", and AI big models are competing for commercialization, the scenario of "writing novels with AI", which has both demand and strong willingness to pay, is becoming a battleground.

01

In China, Wan Lei may be one of the first people to make money using large AI models. He joined Tencent as a product manager through campus recruitment. After four years of work experience, he finally decided to start an AI business in 2023.

"Since 2018, the user time of many softwares has been taken away by ByteDance products, and the data has been visibly reduced. Tencent's anxiety has become that as long as there is a new hot spot on the market, it will immediately follow it." A person close to Tencent told Zizibang. As a former player in the market, Wan Lei was also driven by this anxiety. From short video tools, content consumption, to digital humans, and metaverse concept games, "I was always chasing hot spots and it was difficult to rush to the front."

For Wan Lei, leaving the big company is "a matter of sooner or later", and now, he has chosen AI as the time.

On March 18, 2024, Dark Side of the Moon announced that Kimi smart assistant can now support ultra-long lossless contexts of 2 million words. The "long text" has made Kimi steal the limelight and opened up a new match point for large model manufacturers.

At the same time, as early as 2023, Wan Lei, as the co-founder of Waveform Intelligence, selected the vertical track of novel literary creation and has developed a self-developed vertical domain big model for a full year, building a full technology stack capability including models, agents, knowledge bases, etc. from scratch.

In January 2024, after completing a Pre-A round of financing of 10 million yuan, Waveform Intelligence, where Wan Lei works, released Weaver, a large vertical model for content creation based on its self-developed RecurrentGPT long text generation technology. As "long text" has gone from being a niche track that no one cares about to becoming a must-have scenario for large companies to "show off their muscles", Waveform Intelligence has also taken advantage of Kimi's momentum.

It was launched in January 2024. While CEO Jiang Yuchen was responsible for the continuous iteration of the Weaver big model, Wan Lei spent almost all his time communicating with the authors about their needs.

Although Frog Writing was set up as a paid model from the beginning, during the product launch process, "the data grew very fast every month, and user retention increased from the earliest second-time retention (next-day retention) of 13% to the current paid second-time retention of 45%." Now that it has been on the market for 6 months, the monthly cost of training Weaver last year was nearly one million. At present, the ROI of Frog Writing has basically "hit the mark."

Image: Using AI to write novels Source: Provided by Frog Writing

As early as 2023, Wan Lei made a wave of "quick money" using the ChatGPT application.

Wan Lei assembled a small team of several people, and even team members were part-time. He "shelled the ChatGPT application" and quickly tested several software, including AI companionship, AI education, and AI consulting. For Wan Lei, "Let's shell it first to see if there is a real demand for AI applications."

Wan Lei was quite surprised by the users' enthusiasm for AI tools. Each APP can quickly accumulate hundreds of thousands of users. "Some of our software can generate revenue of nearly 100,000 yuan in a single month after launch. The best AI face-changing application can generate 20,000 to 30,000 yuan in revenue a day." In the face of the rapid growth and high income data, Wan Lei believes that "it doesn't matter if I start a business."

However, after experiencing the rapid rise and fall of several shell apps, "new apps from competitors kept coming online, competing for users, engaging in price wars, and then stopped making profits." Wan Lei believes that AI is an inevitable trend, but without technical barriers, long-term profitability becomes a difficult task.

When Waveform Intelligence was established, Wan Lei found his technical puzzle.

02

However, at a time when large companies are buying for free, the wind of involution has already blown to the track of AI writing. In the single scenario of "writing novels with AI", Tomato Novel, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has already started internal testing of AI-assisted writing functions in early 2024, providing authors with AI expansion, rewriting and other services, and officially launched the AI ​​toolbox in May. From June to now, some authors have disclosed that they have received notices from the site, requiring them to sign a supplementary agreement to uniformly use the contracted works for AI training. After causing controversy, on July 16, Tomato Novel responded on the unofficial writer exchange forum "Dragon's Sky" and the official account of Tomato Novel on Toutiao: "No pure AI writing works have been published, and AI writing capabilities will not be used against the author's personal wishes." At the same time, the author can also terminate the relevant AI terms and conditions. However, it is worth noting that the formal channels for Tomato Novel to release information to authors are often in-site letters. Choosing exchange forums and headline accounts where authors pay less attention seems more like a helpless statement.

In addition to the AI ​​toolbox that is parasitic on the Tomato Novel APP, in January 2024, ByteDance also launched Volcano Writing, making a big move into the related scenarios of "writing novels with AI and writing Xiaohongshu sales copywriting with AI". At the same time, Baidu is also promoting the scenario of "writing novels with AI" in its online disk. Chinese Online and Tencent's Yuewen also launched online literature big models in 2023. Chinese Online has the "Chinese Xiaoyao Big Model" and Yuewen has Yuewen Miaobi, both of which support the generation of 10,000-word novels with one click.

In addition to the reading websites that have already attracted a large number of online writers, not to mention the general term "AI writing", large manufacturers such as Kimi and MiniMax, which are general large models, are also continuing to promote it. According to Feifan Research data, the threshold for the top 50 domestic APP downloads in June was 120,000 times, among which AI writing tools such as Writing Fish and AI Writing Expert tied for 50th place, and AI writing occupied an important corner on the AI ​​tool list.

In fact, the AI ​​writing track is a very broad and very competitive track. In Wan Lei's opinion, any company can make an AI writing software by recruiting two R&D personnel and connecting a large model such as GPT. "If you search for AI writing casually, there will be hundreds or thousands of applications with high traffic. Even AI tools for writing Xiaohongshu copywriting are competing for this keyword. Many software that cuts leeks do not want to be used again after a one-time payment. It is difficult to truly create an application with long-term value."

However, facing the frequent intrusion of large manufacturers, Wan Lei bluntly said, "There is pressure."

In the field of AI novel writing, Wan Lei said, "Many companies have spent millions on training but still have mediocre results, which is a test of the core algorithm capabilities. Many large companies have entered the market. The interactive experience and output effects vary greatly. Many of our users have never written a novel, but they have good creativity and ideas, and can still use it normally and submit it for profit. This is based on a sufficiently good product experience and algorithm effect. "

Figure: Volcano Writing, Tomato AI Toolbox, Conch AI

But compared with new products launched by ByteDance and others, Wan Lei believes that Frog Writing "has already opened up obvious differences with other AI writing tools on the market" in terms of interactive effects and user accumulation.

"At the beginning, the novel outline of WaWa Writing was designed to be 300 words, concise and condensed, but some users reported that they wanted to increase it to 1,500 words." Wan Lei found that this was because the minimum requirement for users to submit 1,500 words when applying to relevant departments, so WaWa Writing quickly expanded the word count. "There are many similar detailed requirements, and it is difficult to obtain them without in-depth understanding of users."

At the same time, as the trend of short plays rises, the demand for writing short plays with AI increases. Faced with the problems of inconsistent formats and inconvenient dissemination, Frog Writing has quickly integrated the most standard format in the current script writing industry.

Compared with large companies with natural traffic advantages, Waveform Intelligence, where Wan Lei works, simply reduced its traffic investment and chose to use social networks to create word-of-mouth. "We constantly communicate with novel authors to explore their needs and let authors who agree with Wa Wa's writing bring in friends."

After the launch of Frog Writing, Wan Lei was active in the core user group almost 24 hours a day. He continuously selected some opinion leaders from dozens of communities and formed a small group of 100 people, including Wan Lei. The product, operation, and even the algorithm responsible for R&D were all online to respond to possible user needs and bugs at any time. Among the needs list of Frog Writing, 60%-70% of them were collected and sorted by Wan Lei from the user community, and even marked the number of feedback and the ID of the core feedback user.

With the continuous optimization of the positive and negative feedback of users and AI in the model, what makes Wan Lei happiest is that the users of WaWa Writing have changed from describing the generated novels as "drawing blind boxes" in the beginning to "drawing cards" now. "From the change of nouns, we can see that the generated effect is more and more in line with the author's writing style and habits. The author will be amazed by the personalized effect and precise output when using it."

As a large vertical model, whether it can build a technical moat relative to large manufacturers is an unavoidable problem for Wan Lei and others. However, being close enough to user needs and "making money" itself also give Wan Lei and others the courage to dig deeper.

In addition to highly retained users, the payment rate of WaWa Writing has now exceeded 4%. "Now the payment rate of tools is generally 1.5%-2%. We have reached around 4.00%, and I think the momentum is still very good." Wan Lei said with a smile.

03

In fact, whether it is a large or small company, profitability has become a top priority. In 2023, China Literature Group, whose revenue continued to decline, not only released the country's first large-scale online literature industry model "China Literature Miaobi", but also the "Writer Assistant Miaobi Edition" application, trying to leverage AI to "survive".

However, people close to China Literature said, "To achieve excellent text training results, the cost is as high as tens of millions. Given the high annual algorithm training costs, China Literature's algorithm department may need to constantly prove the value of its existence. Therefore, because the original main text mode business is unlikely to have a return in the short term, China Literature's algorithm department currently only retains two employees to continue exploring, and then focuses on the text, video and graphics formats with higher user tolerance."

In the field of AI writing, large companies also face revenue pressure with heavy investments and no immediate return.

In 2024, the number of users of WaWa Writing exceeded 200,000, and Waveform Intelligence also launched a writing software called siuuu for the European and American markets, focusing on academic writing scenarios. This product development team located in Shenzhen is also Wan Lei's "old partner" from Tencent.

Now that the software has been on the market for more than a month, "it has accumulated more than 20,000 users. The early user registration rate is higher than that of Frog Writing, and the payment rate has reached 1.8%." For Wan Lei, the overseas market has obviously become a new continent for exploring the profit potential of AI writing.

Not only small and medium-sized manufacturers such as Waveform Intelligence, but large models going overseas has become a trend.

In June 2023, MiniMax, a leading domestic model company, launched the AI ​​character virtual chat software Talkie overseas. According to public data, Talkie has been downloaded nearly 14 million times since its launch, with total revenue of nearly US$830,000. Zhang Peng, CEO of Zhipu AI, also said that it is currently planning overseas business. Baidu has also launched Meira (AI camera), SynClub (AI chat), and wiseAI (AI social) for overseas markets.

However, going overseas also means more investment. According to Venture Capital Daily, although Talkie has reached one million daily active users, it is still far from profitability due to high computing power and marketing costs.

Even though new markets have been developed, the current priority for Waveform Intelligence is to launch the mobile version of Frog Writing in August, and hopes to "reach 500,000 DAU and 5 million total registered users as soon as possible." For them, achieving a positive ROI is just the beginning.

Wan Lei arrives at the company at 9 a.m. every day, attends different product meetings and operation meetings, and then actively responds to various user communities 24 hours a day. Inviting users to the company or conducting phone interviews every week has become a daily routine. In the past month, Wan Lei has started to row on a rowing machine or ride a bicycle around Xixi Wetland after leaving the company. He always goes to bed at 2 or 3 a.m.

Going overseas is not easy, starting a business is difficult, Wan Lei and others are still waiting for their own "highlight moment".

Author: Ma Shuye

Source: WeChat public account: "Alphabet List (ID: wujicaijing)"